“Done for the day?” Harris said.
“No,” William lied. “I just need to get out of the office for a little while. I’ll be back.”
“Some people don’t have real offices,” said Cohoe, who did.
At the elevator, a man appeared at William’s side. It was George Hollister, short and thick, his graying hair shaved tight, his features crowded into the center of his face. George was a nephew of the founders and the nominal boss of the division, though he didn’t come in most days, and when he did, he mostly sat in his corner office watching a Japanese cable channel that none of the other TVs in the building seemed to get.
Hollister was standing next to the last elevator, which worked only by pass card. He and William had a checkered history, in the sense that there were a limited number of moves in the game. Years before, Hollister had seen William out one evening at a performance of the Symphonie Liturgique, making use of subscription tickets Louisa had ordered. Hollister was alone, and possibly a little tipsy, and he had clasped Louisa’s hand and expressed surprise to see William. “I didn’t figure you for a music lover,” he said. A few weeks later, in the office, Hollister asked if he could expect William at Il Seraglio that weekend, and the time after that he wondered if William had any opinion on Dohnányi and laughed aloud. The whole thing began to shade into malice, and William kept to the outer circuit of the hallway in a largely successful effort to avoid Hollister. This time, he had failed.
“Good afternoon,” Hollister said.
“It’s not bad,” William said.
“How have you been?” Hollister said. And then, without waiting for an answer: “I thought of you the other day. I was at a Lyatoshynsky event, the Mourning Prelude.” He held his fingers to his mouth and then opened them in a bloom of appreciation. “But I didn’t see you there. Is everything all right?”
The elevator arrived in time to save George Hollister’s life.
Tuesday came, rang its dampened bell. William rolled out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, urinated, fished his toothbrush from the cup, brushed, showered, toweled dry, pulled comb through hair, pulled clothes onto body, breakfast table, cereal, car, road, parking space, elevator. Somewhere along the way he became himself.
The morning passed without incident: he readied the presentation for O’Shea, reviewed the new brochure, visited the break room at regular intervals. At one, William walked over to the Red Barn, a dim, dingy restaurant on a small side street off Oakmont. Karla, a small forceful brunette who worked hard to seem relaxed, was waiting at a table. “Hi,” she said. “I already ordered. Iced tea, right?”
“You’re too good to me,” he said.
William had been with Karla before Louisa — or, as he liked to say, between Louisas. Karla was a part-time Realtor with a sideline in floristry. She approached both jobs indifferently; her father, an engineer who had discovered a new material for industrial packing, had left her with enough money that she never needed to mention the amount. It was a mountain whose top she couldn’t see. William had met her at work, when he was in advertising. They had been friends at first but had passed across the center of some odd chemical equation and become sporadic lovers. He had other girlfriends and she had other boyfriends. “We do this because we like it,” she said, in a voice that made him unsure whom she was comforting. Then one night at dinner she pointed at his smiling face and said, “I’m about to change that.” She was, she said, pregnant.
He was thirty-two years old, never married. He knew there was, at best, a one-in-four chance that he was the father, but he felt that fraction settle into him with a mix of thrill and misgiving. She kissed him and put her hand in his hair. “I need a sample to know for sure,” she said, and pulled for science.
The DNA tests let him off the hook, pointing instead to a South American businessman who had been in town for the summer only, and then Karla stopped answering William’s calls. When the baby was born, a boy named Christopher, she asked William out for coffee and apologized for cutting him off so abruptly. “For a little while I just couldn’t,” she said. Then Christopher’s father had been piloting a small plane from Miami to the Bahamas when it crashed into the ocean. “It’s not like he was around,” she said. “He didn’t want anything to do with us. But this is so permanent.” Her lower lip trembled. He had never seen her so close to crying.
For a little while they were together again. William read the newspaper to the boy and fed him from a bottle and held him frequently enough that for the rest of his life he would be able to remember the hot little body with its rapid, rabbity heartbeat. When William and Louisa got back together, Karla wrote herself out of the scene, though they still met twice a year to mark the passage of time on each other’s faces.
“Move your elbow,” Karla said, pointing up at the waitress. “She’s trying to give you your iced tea.”
“Thanks, Mom,” William said.
“You wish,” Karla said.
“Speaking of which,” William said, “I have a story.” He had been at the park a few weeks before and had seen Christopher by the basketball courts, ringed by friends. When William had waved, the boy had returned a stiff reverse nod, chin lifted from chest as if by guide wire.
Karla laughed. “Ten years old and already treats you like a colleague.”
“I could use a man like him down at the office.”
“How’s it going over there, anyway?”
“Been better,” he said. “But things are tough all over.”
“True,” Karla said, blushing a bit because she had no idea. She was living in a large house in the best part of town and casually dating a young filmmaker, also independently wealthy, who took her on ski vacations twice a year and was teaching Christopher to ride a horse. “And how’s the home front?”
“Ah, the home front,” William said. “Smooth? Bumpy? Who can say? Louisa’s brother moved to town. She threw a party for him and then refused to come out.”
“For how long?”
“The whole party.”
“Hmm,” Karla said.
“The party’s not the only thing,” William said, and then had to think if it was. “I think she might be hoarding the mail.”
“Hoarding?”
“Squirreling it away. I found two bags of it in the house, hidden in corners.”
“Is she depressed?” Karla, precise in so many things, defaulted to the vaguest language when it came to the feelings of others.
“I don’t think so,” William said. “The other day, she drove me out to a plot of land in the middle of nowhere.”
“Sounds like a mob hit.”
“Turns out it’s land she owns. We own.”
“Congratulations,” she said.
“I guess,” he said. “I stood there in front of the land and felt empty.”
“It’s an investment,” Karla said.
“But in what?”
“In your future,” she said. “I hope you didn’t make her feel bad about it.”
“Sometimes people place the future between themselves and the present,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to make things work now. If I do that, then the future’s just the sound of that same note sustaining.”
“That’s beautiful,” Karla said. The idea was something William had acquired from a magazine, which didn’t make it less beautiful.
William paid, as always. It would have been nothing to Karla, and he wanted it to be something, at least. The cashier was the daughter of the owner. She smiled when she saw him looking at her. He had known the girl since she was six or seven and seen her at least yearly since then. She had been small and plump as a child but was now tall and angular, with a pleasant open face and skin as tight and fresh as an apple. Over the years she had absorbed hundreds of thousands of glances, touches, conversations, not to mention time itself, the minutes, the seconds, the smaller pieces that could not be casually measured but were still indisputable. She had grown thin in part because she had grown full with time. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, and she had the body of a young woman, mostly there, never quite there. William wondered if Karla, looking at the girl, would think of the younger versions of herself, or of an older version of Christopher. William thought of the girl who had sat beside him in school when he was twelve; hair sprouted from beneath her arms and it shocked him. His arms felt leaden, not quite his own, both then and now. He thanked the girl, asked after her father, and went out to join Karla in the parking lot.